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View Full Version : 4E Enemies with Pc classes



Flik9999
2013-09-19, 08:02 PM
Hey I am going to be running a 4E campaighn soon. What I was thinking was that I making monsters as PCs but without any feats or daily powers. My houserule is that AC, defences and bonus to hit never increase with level. (Magic weapons simply increase damage and Armour only does extra effects.)

I was thinking that having the enemies as player characters would remove the problem of encounters dragging on and on. But with no daily powers or feats the NPCS shouldn't be able to 1 shot players. Thoughs on this?

Would this also bring back a bit of the realism that earlier versions of D&D had?

For solos I was thinking of simply doubleing thier HP and allowing them to make 2 standard actions.

Yakk
2013-09-19, 10:07 PM
Monsters have ~33% more HP at a given level, but are assumed to mostly lack healing, unlike PCs.

PCs deal 0% (no optimization) to 100% (acceptable striker) to 200% (optimized striker) more damage per round than monsters. This means that monsters die, while PCs don't, from single rounds of combat.

PCs are designed to be complex to run, with lots of state. Monsters are designed to be easy to run, so a single person (the DM) can run an entire encounter worth of monsters in barely more time than a PC runs a single character.

Feats are relatively unimportant at low levels, and dominate PC power budgets at higher levels.

Even without daily powers, the damage output of a PC is going to be much higher than a monster, at least until later levels when your complete lack of feat and item support will make your PC-as-monster damage anemic.

I'm not sure how a PC is more realistic than a monster. PCs are more fine grained in their emulation, but the player interact with monsters in a far more coarse way than they interact with their PCs, so that seems optimal.

I'm not aware of a version of D&D that had "realism".

Flik9999
2013-09-20, 06:34 AM
3.5/ Pathfinder was close to realism as if you focused on one player or monster it would probably die.

Yakk
2013-09-20, 10:27 AM
No version of D&D is even in the same country as "realism". That includes 3.5 D&D. If you think that your D&D has lots of "realism", you are mistaken.

In "reality", swords don't chip away at abstract HP on targets. Sword blows for the most part aim to kill or seriously injure (in a way that degrades combat performance). The rules of D&D are based off of some easy to run mass battle rules hastily hacked up to work with individual "hero" units, then fossilized into convention by decades of history and players.

This is a good thing, because a realistic simulation of humans with sharp sticks going up against 50' long magic powered giant lizards would be less fun than D&D.